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Often , when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night , which , resuming his own intense thoughts through the day , carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies , and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain , till the very throbbing of his life - spot became insufferable anguish ; and when , as was sometimes the case , these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base , and a chasm seemed opening in him , from which forked flames and lightnings shot up , and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them ; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him , a wild cry would be heard through the ship ; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room , as though escaping from a bed that was on fire . Yet these , perhaps , instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness , or fright at his own resolve , were but the plainest tokens of its intensity . For , at such times , crazy Ahab , the scheming , unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale ; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock , was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again . The latter was the eternal , living principle or soul in him ; and in sleep , being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind , which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent , it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing , of which , for the time , it was no longer an integral . But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul , therefore it must have been that , in Ahab’s case , yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose ; that purpose , by its own sheer inveteracy of will , forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self - assumed , independent being of its own . Nay , could grimly live and burn , while the common vitality to which it was conjoined , fled horror - stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth . Therefore , the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes , when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room , was for the time but a vacated thing , a formless somnambulistic being , a ray of living light , to be sure , but without an object to colour , and therefore a blankness in itself . God help thee , old man , thy thoughts have created a creature in thee ; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus ; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever ; that vulture the very creature he creates . CHAPTER 45 . The Affidavit . So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book ; and , indeed , as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales , the foregoing chapter , in its earlier part , is as important a one as will be found in this volume ; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon , in order to be adequately understood , and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds , as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair .
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